Resistance (8 page)

On a trip to Calcutta in 1991 I met Mother Teresa. Like Minty she broke down further my sense of what was right, of what had to happen, by entering the misery around her instead of trying to beat it into submission. I don’t know about sainthood, but I would have to say she was owned by no one but God, and that her God was as ecumenical as the air we inhaled. She took me with her into the streets— or I followed her; she was not an instructor in that sense—and I saw unfold there what must have occurred in Galilee all those centuries ago. Her incomprehensible compassion and ministration, anonymous as water.

I got off the ships for good in Manila, during the last year of Corazon Aquino’s presidency. I had no goal after that but to encounter the destitute, to offer a few words of condolence, eye to eye, hand to hand, and for that moment to have no separation between us because of race or other circumstance. Sometimes, with the elderly, I would try to wash a face. I provided as I could. Through a retired ship captain I got a job as an orderly in the Cancer Detection Center at Quezon Memorial Hospital. The income from that job helped with everything.

There was something else I had thought about, too, ever since Minty and I went to Paris. It was the way that music broke you up and held you, how it tripped up fear’s great authority over life, how it put you back in the world you were sometimes so desperate to leave. From those days on I traveled with tapes of Hubert Laws, Chick Corea, Jaco Pastorius, and the others. I listened in my room on West Eighty-ninth Street when I was in the seminary and on the ships and on night shift at the hospital. And then I took what was for me a bold step. I had some limitations to contend with at my age, but I learned to play the tenor sax. Sonny Rollins. Roland Kirk. Charles Lloyd. I thought if I could get three or four compositions down from their repertoires, and learn to improvise, if I could play out in a field at night so the tones would just carry to distant rooms with their windows open, it would be like that night in Montmartre had been for me, when a friend cracked open the shell in which I had been content to see but never actually meet the world.

Jefferson deShay, physician, social
historian, editor,
The Correspondence
of Corazon Aquino,
three volumes, on
leaving Cagayan de Oro, Mindanao,
the Philippines

Nítch′i

Like many young men on the run from the threat of leading a common existence, I spent the early years of my adult life in very remote regions of the earth—the Tanami Desert, the Chukchi Sea, the Kalahari scrub. I tried to move on foot through those geographies with a level of awareness so sharp I would leave no trace of my passing. I strove to be invisible. The tolerance of those I traveled with—it was their country, always—was great, and of course I was a source of amusement to them. I was naive, but so were they; and I was trying to solve a problem they had not yet heard of.

My schooling was exceptional, if you think of it in terms of the quality of the teaching and my exposure to the wellsprings of Western ideas— Hotchkiss, Yale, graduate work in anthropology at Stanford. However, I wasn’t able to extract from this instruction what I needed to live. I could
make
a good living, but something essential always appeared to me to be missing. Think of a mountain lake somewhere, caught in a flattering light—a stunning scene, but then you learn the lake holds no fish. Think of a marriage with no moments of abandon. If I’d gone into religious studies instead of anthropology, perhaps life would have unfolded very differently for me; but unless I had actively broken with my traditions, I would have been trained to follow the theologies of redemption—Judaism, Christianity, Islam. The presumption there is that though humanity has started off badly and is burdened with sin, it can achieve a state of perfection through diligence and self-improvement.

I was more taken with theologies of creation. The world is beautiful and we are a part of it. That’s all. Our work is not to improve, it is to participate. I was a long while coming to an understanding of these thoughts, and in my late teens and early twenties I thrashed about in the confines of my own ignorance and fears.

I was too young, during those times of disaffection, to have taken up one of the Eastern religions, for example, as anything more than trappings, a costume. Overall, I would have to say I simply didn’t trust organized religion, most especially what American and English missionaries pushed so aggressively on the people of other countries. When I watched my mother prepare for church on Sunday mornings, I would detect someone shaping the many disappointments of her life into a stance, an attitude toward God that was dutiful, if reproving. God, on occasion, was a disappointment to her. Our High Episcopalian position was not an expression of faith, it was a hedge against theological eventualities. We approached the realm of religion as a patrician accountant might suffer the questions of some agent of the authorities. Our approach lacked joy, certainly, also sincerity. And forget about the ecstasy of St. Teresa, the mysticism of St. John of the Cross.

My father emphasized from the start that I could be a success in life with a quite simple formula. My schooling, along with an introduction to men in business and government, together with a suitable financial initiation into adult life, would all be provided; my only responsibilities, my father would say pointedly, were to do well in school and to conduct myself in public in such a way as to be worthy of the endowment. No scandal, no excesses.

My father was, and is, no fool. I have to say he is a loving man, a husband and father devoted to his family’s welfare, though the issue of the family’s welfare was generally murky and always, for me, ominous. Initially, my father and I were very close; now it’s as if we had been born into separate families, separate cultures. It’s most often a risk to assume what someone else might believe, but I think my father remains hugely puzzled about why I declined to accept all that he once offered. When I was eighteen I couldn’t explain my resistance to him. I didn’t have clear reasons, and I had no life experience to call on, to make my half reasons resonate. In my twenties the argument from reason lost its appeal. And by then I’d ceased to feel any need to explain the path I’d taken.

I was probably insufferable in my self-righteousness, arguing with my parents, a bore in my angry young man’s stance. But I was only earnest in trying to show them—and myself—that I was to be taken seriously. Nothing in the way we lived prepared me for what I felt compelled to do. And because trying to say what that was only made me sound like a fool, it increased the distance between us.

On their side, my parents gave up trying to make a place for me in their world, a decision that hurt more than I allowed them to see. I wished they’d asked what place I wanted to have, instead of reacting with so much exasperation and a sense of being imposed on when I didn’t accept what they thought would work for them. They seemed to think the issues that lay at the heart of their life— fidelity to law and custom, formal education, social standing, vigorous patriotism—were goals I was indifferent to or despised. That wasn’t so. With some allowance for interpretation, I shared their ideals.

My mother made all this especially hard. She dismissed as ludicrous any friend of mine whose politics or religion (let alone diction or way of dress) was not in keeping with her own. With my houseguests she was barely civil if they were not obviously wellborn, Protestant, and white. Her scorn for what I valued cut so deep it created doubts I couldn’t throw off. I was well into my thirties, and long gone from home, before I could see her condescension as anything other than cavalier disdain. It was, instead, her nearly frantic fear of what was unfamiliar. It was so strong it made her want to set fire to the thing.

Our falling out, predictably, came over the war in Vietnam. My father told me that if I didn’t want to go, I needn’t. He could arrange that. But to run to Canada or to register as a conscientious objector would be disastrous. His premise was that once I got the “rebellion” out of my system, I meant to have a life like his; and he worried that wouldn’t be possible after such a flagrant and unsophisticated denunciation of the country’s official position.

I always had the feeling in our please-come-into-my-study discussions—after I’d helped organize protests in the San Joaquin Valley with the United Farm Workers; the time right before I left for graduate work in anthropology, when he said I was beginning to take too serious an interest in Indians; and when I quit the lacrosse team in my senior year at Yale after I was elected captain—I always felt he was reviewing my life like a faithful family attorney who’d resigned himself to preparing a cantankerous witness. The testimony he wanted to nudge out of me might have fallen well on the ears of men like those who sat on his board of directors, but it wasn’t my language.

It was hard for me to acknowledge to him back then that his carefully reasoned objections to my plans often made me think them through again, and sometimes to change my mind. With regard to the war in Southeast Asia, the reconsideration he forced resulted in a profound change. As much as I wanted to be viewed by others as a CO, as convincing as I could be defending that position, the truth was I was not. Somewhere deep in my tissues I believed in all the simplistic abstractions upon which the country had been founded, in the high Enlightenment principles of justice and equality. And I further accepted that these principles were threatened by Nguyen Giap’s Vietcong and Ho Chi Minh’s design to reunite the Vietnams under Communism.

On a cold February morning in New Haven, a few months before I graduated, I boarded a bus for New York and at the Thirty-fourth Street Armory went through a daylong military physical. At the time, 1966, assuming you would be drafted anyway, opting for an early physical would allow you to pick the branch of the military you wanted to serve in. I’d chosen to train as an army medic. I would not kill anyone except in self-defense. Instead, I would try to evacuate and save the wounded. To my astonishment and relief I did not pass the physical. Torn cartilage in my knees, they said. Lacrosse.

The graduate work in anthropology I was then completely free to pursue led me to believe that while human cultures are markedly different—and that you ignored those differences at your peril— some human social arrangements were so widespread and so enduring that to dismantle them seemed at least risky, if not stupid. The central problem in my imagination, given that people were social animals, was this: How much latitude could a society give an individual without threatening its own fabric? When my father told me to make something of myself, he meant, not incidentally, for me to mold around myself a family that would direct its energies toward what
I
hoped to accomplish. It would be
my
decisions that would set the tone and direction of the lives of my wife and children. Of course, this arrangement broke down repeatedly in my father’s time, precipitating divorce and other kinds of ruinous harm and violence. But he was not changed in his belief.

I asked him once what it meant to “provide” as a spouse. “Food on the table, money in the bank,” was his instant answer. This was his gospel, but I don’t think it was what he actually believed. What my father adhered to and what he believed were not always the same thing, and in that difference was the source of his fury when life didn’t go according to his plan. If I had suggested to him that to provide for his family might mean the type of commitment that translated into time spent at home—if I’d even been able to frame that thought—it would have forced his towering indignation, my suggestion being read as an accusation.

We reached out to each other a hundred unsuccessful times.

What I could never make clear to my father was that I did not believe he owed me any explanation for the shape of his life. In my view, the basic arrangements of social organization for human beings—drawn from ten thousand years or more of family and village life—had been changed so radically and so swiftly over the last hundred years by the demands of industrialization that the benefits of these long-established arrangements were now forgotten.

We are together on a careering ship, I wanted to suggest to him. We need to be loving and frank, even if we cannot agree about the necessary repairs. We have to be fearless about facing what I had once told him was an unbankable future.

He hated the idea—which I constantly forced on him—that by comparison with traditional, indigenous communities Americans were a lonely and unhappy people. For him, the quality of anyone’s possessions was a fair indication of the quality of that person’s life. If your belongings were meagre, your shelter spare, your art scant, your food unrefined, your history uneventful, your system of transport not mechanized, your philosophy undebated, if all you’d done was endure, he saw nothing to admire.

He told me it was envy that drove the editors of foreign newspapers to routinely disparage American culture, to write that it hinged on constant distraction, on the promotion of anxieties, disorders, and thwarted dreams that consumerism could easily fix.

“Which of these editors,” he said to me one night, “would ever refuse my circumstances if they were offered.”

He spoke like an addict, God forgive me.

It was long ago that we had these disagreements. The last one, the breaking apart, was about patriotism. “A patriot stands with his country, especially in troubled times, even when he doubts the wisdom of the path chosen by those in power,” he would reiterate for me. “He doesn’t call for the reinvention of society, he doesn’t promote divisive statements or make incendiary remarks.”

I argued for another sort of patriotism, one that did wonder aloud whether allowing business so strong and so legally unrestrained a voice in government would take our experiment in democracy into the sea.

My father and I could find no way to love each other, except by seeking refuge in the memory of our early life together, where there was no conflict. We assumed, without wishing to think more on it, that following on those years something had simply gone wrong.

My children now find in me, I am certain, the flaws I once saw in him. Intransigence. Denial. I am mortified, not just embarrassed, to have to admit that in some fundamental way I have failed, both as a father and as a spouse. My determination to succeed came to an unforeseen end, which defeat there is no escaping.

For a long while the five of us were a rebellious crew. We shared a radical politics and expressed ourselves in public forums in similar ways: respectfully confrontational, morally adamant, politically skeptical. But I—or we—could not love each other as we had hoped. We unraveled. And then the children’s mother and I decided to end it. She and I shared a kind of bewilderment in addition to the sadness, bitterness, and relief that were to be expected. We could not explain it to the children. We had planned to make a difference. Beyond petty flare-ups of frustration that came in a particular moment during the formal dismantling of our family, it could be said that no one was asked to shoulder the major blame, and no one sought revenge. We took pride in that.

We wanted, but in the eyes of our friends did not get, an exemplary divorce. Our lawyers, like soldiers, preferred combat to negotiation. They went after, exacerbated, and then exploited the otherwise unremarkable unhappiness everyone feels over the circumstances of life.